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Tuesday, 23 March 2010

Unscrupulous Professionals

Not content with my various not-for-profit type activities, I found myself thinking today about another online venture I would like to launch.

It would be called www.unscrupulousprofessionals.com

Unscrupulous Professionals would allow you to access the most venal, pragmatic and unethical members of a given profession for your own ends. I was thinking about it because I feel like I ought to go to the dentist but I don't want to. The reason I don't want to is because the dentist is morally obliged to tut and complain and tell you you don't floss enough and generally fill you with SHAME for your dirty teeth to such a degree that you leave in a puddle of humiliation. I feel that in this day and age, I ought to be able to access another kind of dentistry.

I want my unscrupulous dentist to conduct all procedures - including check up and scrape and polish - under twilight anasthaesia. I want him or her to drop the floss-related nagging and general disapproval, and give me opiates for tooth whitening. In fact, forget about the opiates, put me into a medically induced coma for a week for tooth whitening. It stings. Ideally I want my unscrupulous dentist to come from a culture where potentially shaming topics are dealt with by total avoidance. Ideally they might offer me a mask to wear while they work and they would make no eye contact.

I thought this principle could well be extended to other professions. For instance, I want my bank to stop attempting to provide me with any information regarding my financial status. Instead they should allow me to spend and spend and spend without demurring until they finally come round, and very discreetly and apologetically take away all my possessions. As a matter of extreme urgency, they should also address the issue of allowing my account balance to be displayed on screen when I use cash machines. This is not a good thing and must be stopped.

I want a doctor who will say that having a jaw lift is in fact a medical necessity and will write me a sick note for 4, no maybe 6 is safer, weeks recovery. He will also understand that generalised anxiety is a debilitating condition to be treated with an infinitely renewable prescription for Xanax, and a forest of sick notes.

More generally I want all medical professionals on unscrupulousprofessionals.com to forget about the nonsense of informed consent. I don't want to hear that there is a 30% chance of total paralysis when you treat my ingrowing toenail. What I want to hear is that my open heart surgery will be like a gentle roll in the spring grass, that it will not sting more than the claws of a baby kitten, and that I will rise from the operating table miraculously cured, 20 cms taller and with a nicer nose.

I also want retail outlets to provide camouflage packaging to disguise frivolous non-essential purchases as essentials such as food, loo roll and the like.

I am sure you can think of others. Go on. I have 800 biscuits still to make, you're going to have to make your own entertainment tonight again.

23 comments:

Exclusively for you, I can think of a lovely one: your unscrupulous dog-share-er (which is not exactly profession, but rather a love-bind hobby) would keep whippette for weeks, instead of days. For no reason. Another one that I already sort of do: journalist writing completely fake news.

A beauty therapist who would have no problem rendering you unconscious for the duration of all her sadist, torturous treatments, in particular the bikini wax. This would shield you not only from the agonising pain, but from the humiliation and peculiar self-consciousness that arises from lying half naked with your over-grown bits exposed to a sneering, well-preened stranger. You would wake depilated, refreshed and shame-free!

Try the third world. My dentist in Panama is just like that. He smiles, sits me down and puts a pair of video contraption glasses on me, shoves a video ipod in my hand and lets me watch crap panamanian TV shows or blockbusters at my will while he attacks me. I always feel happy leaving, not least because he is cheap, even when he tells me I need to have the top of the dead root of my left incisor cut off at the bone. Im sure you could easily find all those unscrupulous professionals in Panama. There is a huge industry devoted to it. They will even fly you in.

I would very much like to hire an unscrupulous accountant says things like "well, would you look at that, you're owed millions and millions of dollars and it's all tax free and here's some chocolate and I'll only contact you again when I find some more funds at your disposal and have a nice day". And I would say "thank you very much".

I would like an optician who would lazer treatment my eyes, have a nice place that would look after me for the 3 days it takes to get better, and then remoe the money from my account without telling me, and somehow without making a dent in my bank balance.

hey! i can clean your teeth unscrupulously if you like. after 15 years, i have given up lecturing patients about oral hygiene because, somewhere around 10 years ago, i stopped giving a fuck. they're your teeth, right? and aside from you bringing in spectacularly disturbing samples of your last week's lunch, i really truly do. not. care. what you do with them. by extension, if you really don't care about them, i have a suggestion too: stop coming to see me. it'll be easier on both of us.

BTW, i so want cocktails before letting a stranger take a look at my lady bits!

When I lived in Dallas, we had a Bad Doctor. Medically, he was awesome, knew his stuff, etc. But he wrote scripts for Xanax, Valium what-have-you like they were vitamins. When my husband went on a certain medication, I asked if he needed to quit drinking. Oh, no, that's not a problem! He did suggest not combining the Xanax AND the Lunesta AND the likker. Now we're back in the Nanny State with a good doc who tells us to lose weight and stop drinking and blah-blah-biddy-blah and we have to make up paralyzing-fear-of-flying-and-we-fly-a-lot-for-business stories just to get some goddamn Valium. I miss Bad Doctor.

all the rest i can live with... but the dentist...always i feel shame and self-loathing. no wonder no one wants to go! and i told the last dentist that. which is why i have been told to find another dentist. so, absolutely i want your unscrupulous dentist when you locate him/her. i want to be totally unconscious for everything from x-rays to drilling to whitening.

My dentist told me I didn't need two hygienist appointments per year because of my spectacular home regimen, so I went off and didn't come back for, oh, two years or so. So that kind of backfired a little.

Oddly, their little motto - on all their brochures - is "We promise not to tell you off."

Could I please request an unscrupulous cleaner who also surreptitiously declutters/chucks out the rubbish you'll never need but doesn't touch or alter the things that you would miss? And maybe they could also discreetly dispose of my bloke's mountain of keepsakes and useless things kept for sentimental reasons.

my dentist has an alarming disregard for moralizing. this might be due to the fact he's French, but he seems to think tobacco/red wine stained teeth are acceptable. but the anglosaxon part of me visits him precicely BECAUSE i need a telling off to get the motivation to floss for another six months. it's very confusing.

I would very much like not to have to make conversation with the lady who does the bikini wax. There's just no need. I am not physically capable of gritting my teeth while making polite small talk. I would just like to go in, close my eyes for fifteen minutes and then leave without any social interaction whatsoever. A cocktail beforehand would definitely be a bonus.

Oh, I'm sure he meant try to keep to 200 bottles a year. I mean, everyone drinks a bottle or two in a night once in a while. Especially over Christmas, when it's such a treat to start at noon and never really stop.